Translate to multiple languages

Thursday, December 07, 2017

New and old digital divides are Balkanizing the Internet, threatening to
split apart not only students but also communities. This constitutes
one of the most important issues confronting the U.S. higher education
technology community.

Students, staff, and faculty must be online in order to participate in learning management systems, digital tests, student information systems, licensed databases, and the entire web. They not only must be reliably online but also need to do so through high-speed connectivity. The digitally networked world is increasingly predicated on users having broadband access.

Unfortunately, Internet access has remained deeply uneven and unequally distributed in the United States.1 This has serious implications for higher education. Inequitable digital connections can warp access to learning, which in turn can help drive and escalate social inequality. Indeed, the "new" digital divides — which create a Balkanized Internet — may constitute one of the most important issues confronting the U.S. higher education technology community. A Short History of Digital Divides Uneven Internet access is not a new problem. It has been an issue since
the invention of the Internet in the late 1960s. With the inception of
the U.S. Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network
(ARPANET) in 1969, the number of computers, modems, connections, and
nodes grew slowly through the 1970s and 1980s. Owning or otherwise
having access to a networked computer was by no means ubiquitous.
Although the burgeoning networked ecosystem gradually, then more
rapidly, increased opportunities for access, those opportunities
depended on who had access to the right combination of hardware,
networking, and software. As connection speeds began to advance past
dialup, they too were unevenly distributed, as per science fiction
writer William Gibson's famously cited observation that the future is
already here — it's just not evenly distributed yet.2

By the 1990s, the importance and size of the Internet and its new face,
the World Wide Web, became popularly recognized, as did inequalities of
access. Accordingly, the United States took steps to identify and
mitigate what many were referring to as the digital divide by
kicking off a generation of research, activism, policy development, and
practice. Under the Clinton administration, federal and state government
initiatives joined with nonprofits and businesses to expand Internet
access across multiple fronts. TheE-Rate program of 1996, for example, compelled telecommunications companies to divert resources in order to link public schools to the burgeoning Internet.

Efforts to address the digital divide continued in the first two decades
of the 21st century, with the advent of programs such as One Laptop per Child and state-driven broadband initiatives. Meanwhile, Internet technology
continued to change. Mobile phone access came belatedly to the United
States after connecting much of the rest of the world, since America had
both excellent landline phone service and more Internet-connected
computers than most other nations. But once it came, the cell phone
revolution offered an alternative to landlines, fiber, and cable boxes.
Maximum Internet speeds grew, partly through competition between
Internet service providers (ISPs) and also due to research and
development, with Internet2 serving as an advanced outlier. Public libraries became community Internet anchors, as librarians not only provided computers, networks,
and software but also offered the widest possible range of user training
and support. More and more of education, work, and life migrated
online, especially once social media took off in popularity and usage.
Richer media that required more bandwidth became increasingly popular:
animated images, sound files (music and podcasts), streaming video,
videoconferencing and webinars, software updates and downloads, and
gaming. And yet, broadband remained less than ubiquitous throughout the
21st century. By May 2013, to pick one data point, only 70 percent of
households had high-speed broadband3 — and "high-speed" was defined at a lower speed than what we expect now, in 2017.

The Current Digital Divides Where does the Internet access gap stand now, at the end of 2017? We can
look back on these historical transformations and see that Internet
access inequalities have altered in some ways while persisting in
others. The concept continues to deeply determine our Internet
experience, dividing it into uneven strata of user access and capacity.4Most of the forces that drive uneven Internet access have been at work
for decades. To begin with, wealth and education often positively
correlate with higher broadband use, as the more affluent and/or
educated a family is, the more likely it is to have broadband at home
and work. This makes intuitive sense when we think of the costs of
laptop and desktop computers and of the greater budgets of schools in
wealthier districts. Poorer students have less access to computer
science offerings, from classes to afterschool clubs. In addition,
higher levels of educational attainment increase one's likelihood of
learning digital skills, as well as one's chance of working in a field
heavily dependent on the networked world.5

Wealth can drive familiarity with computation even more strongly than
generational differences, as media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan argued
nearly ten years ago. Living in a poor or working-class economic stratum
can lead to reduced access in a variety of ways, from inferior
equipment to filtering. Poverty can remove urban residents from the
relatively plentiful broadband networks that cities host. And ISPs may
already be discriminating in speed offerings based on poverty, according
to recent complaints to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).6Racial inequalities also shape access. Blacks, Latinos, and Native
Americans continue to lag whites and Asian-Americans in home broadband
speeds and access. At least partially in compensation, the former are
more likely to use cell phones for connectivity. This may constitute a
digital version of the 20th-century real estate practice of redlining:
restricting certain populations from access to desired locations. Race
is also tied in to the earlier mentioned economic issues, as blacks and
Latinos generally have lower incomes and lower savings than do whites.7 As D. Amari Jackson has observed:

The good news? Your daughter's school has been designated an "Apple
Distinguished School" and, as such, she and all of her peers will
receive brand new iPads for their individual usage.

The bad news? Once your daughter leaves school, she can't use it — at
least not at home. For you live in a lower-income neighborhood without
access to Internet or a fast-enough connection to take advantage of her
shiny new toy.8

Though wealth is likely a stronger factor, age is another correlate with
Internet access: the older an American is, the less likely he/she is to
have a speedy connection and the more likely he/she is to use the
Internet for less time.Read more...

"Panel members from an EDUCAUSE 2017 Annual Conference session offer
insights about the role of provosts and chief academic officers in
digital courseware deployment and the challenges of using technology to
advance teaching, learning, and student success."Source: EDUCAUSE Review

0
comments:

Contact me

About Me

Hello, my name is Helge Scherlund and I am the Education Editor and Online Educator of this personal weblog and the founder of eLearning • Computer-Mediated Communication Center.
I have an education in the teaching adults and adult learning from Roskilde University, with Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and Human Resource Development (HRD) as specially studied subjects. I am the author of several articles and publications about the use of decision support tools, e-learning and computer-mediated communication. I am a member of The Danish Mathematical Society (DMF), The Danish Society for Theoretical Statistics (DSTS) and an individual member of the European Mathematical Society (EMS). Note: Comments published here are purely my own and do not reflect those of my current or future employers or other organizations.